MEDITATION TIP OF THE WEEK
…IS A SERIES OF SHORT, EASY TO REMEMBER, AND BASIC TIPS ON MEDITATION. PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK, IS IT HELPFUL?
Meditation Isn’t Easy!
Anyone who tells you that meditation is easy hasn’t spent much time meditating…or is a saint! (I was going to say that anyone who said that meditation is easy is full of crap but…I decided to give such people the benefit of the doubt.)
Seriously, anyone who’s tried to meditate knows that when you sit down to meditate, it feels like the most unnatural thing to do. Oh yah, sure, you can experience a bit of “blissing out” at first, or “relaxation.” But just try to keep it up, just try to establish a routine that contradicts your usual busy-ness or multi-tasking lifestyle. Then what?!
Then your mind will begin to make up all kinds of excuses not to practice. You’ll suddenly remember that you forgot to walk the dog (and you don’t even have one!), or make a shopping list…for car parts!, or iron your…toilet-paper.
All of a sudden you’ll become very creative in finding reasons…any reasons, not to meditate. You’ll suddenly discover that you’re really a visual artist as brilliant as Van Gogh, or that you want to take up underwater basket-weaving.
Or, maybe you’ll really make the commitment to a meditation practice, but will find it almost impossible to get any practice done because things that truly are important in life, like your family, health, or job, take up all of your time.
Why is this? Why is learning to meditate and keeping up a meditation practice difficult?
Meditation Brings Up Resistance
Meditation brings up your resistance to meditation. Why? Because it contradicts your usual habits of distraction.
What you may find as you begin to meditate is that many of your habits of being distracted seem to get worse. You’ll sit down to begin your daily practice of 20-minutes and before you know it, you’ve gotten up from your cushion or couch and are writing down your shopping list. Or, you’ll set aside your 10-minutes of morning meditation time and find that the thoughts that arise are enough to send you running from the room with tears streaming from your eyes.
Resistance happens because we’re not used to just observing our usual mind, the normal mind that delights in being distracted with thoughts and emotions. We engage in our thoughts about the past, hopes for the future, and distraction from the present. And, to a certain extent, this distraction is comfortable because…we’re used to it!
So, resistance happens because, like with anything else in life, change can be uncomfortable.
There’s a saying that goes something like this, “The only person who likes change is a baby with a dirty diaper.”
Meditation Requires Practice
I know that I’ve written a lot about integrating meditation into your daily life and using all of your activities as the basis for your meditation practice. But that doesn’t mean that learning to meditate doesn’t take practice. And to practice, you’ve got to make the commitment to learn.
I think that I’ve been a bit to simplistic recently, writing about how to use all of your daily life as the opportunity to practice. I think that I’ve been forgetting to emphasize that in order to have a stable meditation practice, you need to have a formal practice.
A formal practice involves setting aside time from your usual routine to engage your meditative mind. It means “strengthening the muscle of meditation.”
“But,” you say, “I’m already too busy with all of the rest of the things that I do in my life. Meditation will just become another thing that I have to do.” Well, you’re correct…in a way.
Meditation Helps You to Experience Life More Fully
When you begin to meditate, or even if you’ve been doing it for a while, you begin to get insight into how distracted your mind can be. Now, imagine if your mind could be less distracted in all of the daily activities that you have going on; wouldn’t you experience your life more fully.
Meditation can being your more fully aware and alive into your daily life. So, taking the time to establish a formal meditation practice pays off in the long-run, it’s a long-term investment! While taking the time now to establish a stable meditation practice may seem like a big effort, the payoff will benefit you for the rest of your life.
Meditation Takes Patience…But It’s Worth It!
Learning to meditate takes some time and patience, but the payoff is worth it. Science has already proven the many benefits of meditation. And all you need to do is to ask someone who has established their meditation practice (I’d be happy to discuss it with you through e-mails!), and you’ll hear that what you gain is worth the journey.
The best way to experience the benefits of meditation is to begin…now. Don’t worry about whether you have “good” experiences or “bad” ones, don’t get discouraged by distractions. Just do it! How? Glad you asked:
This site has tons of tools for learning how to meditate and be compassionate.
I encourage you to look through the HUNDREDS of articles that I’ve written and especially check out my weekly meditation tips and other useful meditation materials provided for your health and well being. Please let me know if you’d like to discuss anything with me, have any questions or need clarification regarding anything that I’ve written about.
Other Great Meditation Resources and Information:
For More Information on How to Meditate
Please view the Related Stuff below for help getting started in your meditation practice! Also don’t forget to download my free e-book, Can Meditation Change the Way that You View Your World? and download the free e-book, How to Work with the Four Distractions to Meditation and get started learning how to deal with some of the major obstacles in meditation.
As always, please feel free to share your comments on meditation and contact me if you’d like to see additional content or other discussions on this site.
[…] It’s not that learning to meditate is difficult…although it may be. It’s that once you’ve learned, you need to practice it and the best way to do this is to take “mini-breaks” during the day to practice. […]
[…] a previous post I wrote that learning to meditate may not be easy, at least not at first. One of the the main things that makes learning difficult is our belief that […]
[…] I’ve been given the gift of learning how to meditate, and because I practice it formally as well as in daily life, it’s my meditation practice that makes my ER shifts go well. […]
Hi, Jerome,
I also teach people to meditate, and I’m also working on the same project that you suggested I show to IONS during an infusion at UC. My personal practice generally involves short sessions, the group sessions that I teach generally involve visualizations, intentional invocations of the heart chakra and other chakras, and finally a conversational technique that intersperses dialogue with intense inner silence. (This technique is called the Chrysalis, because it regularly and predictably creates massive transformational change.)
What I’ve noticed is that there are a few people who tell me they cannot meditate, and these are generally the same people who do not know how to use the inner silence steps of the Chrysalis. This is also why in most of my existing automated apps, there’s a very short inner silence step. When I get the entire curriculum that I was working on at UC automated, a significant number of them will use short-term inner silence steps. (If you remember me, I’ve been signed up for your newsletter for years, and you can use my email from your system to contact me.)
Of course, I’m honest about the fact that there is no such thing as inner silence until we’re dead, and the fact that I use the term as a shorthand to point in a direction, and I also am honest about my own challenges in moving in that direction. My reasons for creating methods that use short-term inner silence, is first of all, but I’ve known a lot of people don’t have the patience to meditate very well on their own, and second of all, us Westerners seem to be interested in activities that can support our goals. So although I know that short-term inner silence does not replace regular longer sessions, nor does it replace retreats, I believe that it is a useful tool.
This small subgroup of the population seems to be so goal-oriented or anxiety-driven that the only way that I know to meet them where they are at is to develop techniques that will help them with their goals. Unfortunately, most meditation guidance that I have found anywhere (with the exception of some visualization-based guided meditations) emphasize that meditation requires putting all goals aside. For this small subgroup, the whole system of traditional meditation misses their entire beings because of their pre-existing wounding.
And yet, all of us have pre-existing wounding, and I do not want to therefore leave people with pre-existing wounds behind. One reason I was interested in this blog was that I hoped it would have more information that would help me communicate with this particular subgroup of Westerners.
Mindfulness, however perverted it has become in pop culture, is a specific kind of inner silence which involves bare attention — attention without concepts or words. In “The Heart of Buddhist Meditation,” Nyanaponika Thera states, “Mindfulness, then, is the unfailing master key for knowing the mind, and is thus the starting point; the perfect tool for shaping the mind, and is thus the focal point; the lofty manifestation of the achieved freedom of the mind, and is thus the culminating point.”
I think I need to send this quote to my friend, because I didn’t bother digging it out from my deeply buried memory stores until writing this reply, but it seems to suggest that there is a goal-oriented purpose for inner silence and meditation that might appeal to her, but on the other hand, it doesn’t really address the anxiety that drives her inability to meditate or to even achieve short-term inner silence.
I wonder if you have any other insights about how to address people who are so goal-oriented or anxiety-driven that they can’t see any point. I know that this woman hangs around my groups, presumably because she needs what we represent to her, and she has been a good friend to me in some ways. For example, during my COVID illness, she’s been constantly on the phone or email checking in on me, making sure that I’m safe and okay.
Hello Cougar,
Wow!! Where to start!? Thanks for that in-depth description of what you’re encountering when trying to share the wisdom of a still mind and open heart. I’ll keep this short and to the point:
As you know, at its heart, mindfulness is a state of non-distraction, and mindful-awareness, aka “meditation” is a state where we’re able to simply remain with all that arises, free from elaboration, where whatever arises is self-liberated when we simply allow it to “be.”
As such, trying to share with those who are goal oriented can be extremely challenging, especially since the “goal” of meditation isn’t to have any goal, but to simply be. Therefore, I feel like coming back to the present moment-by-moment awareness, and allowing all desire, even one to achieve anything, to simply arise and free itself within the spaciousness of awareness, is key to learning to free oneself from the goal.
How to do this? That’s where your own skill in meditation will bring you the wisdom to know how to respond to those who wish to study with you, eh? 😉
Hope that helps.
Please feel free to reply.
Take care
silence, is first of all, but I’ve known a lot of people don’t
EDITS:
silence, is first of all, because I’ve known a lot of people who don’t
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my deeply buried memory stores until writing this reply, but it seems to suggest
EDIT my deeply buried memory stores until writing this reply, because it seems to suggest
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